Volunteering in the community and fundraising for worthy causes are what your employees do because it’s part of your company values. Not recruiting campaigns. But these initiatives are important stories to tell in your Recruitment Marketing strategy because candidates want to know what you stand for.
When employees come together for a cause, there’s often a lot of employee-generated content such as photos and videos that are shared on social media. With a little planning, you can ensure these employee stories are shared through your career channels as well, so that candidates can see the company’s values in action.
Facebook is a great platform to aggregate this content, because you can include just about any content type, and you can engage employees and their family and friends, who could become potential candidates.
Who’s Practicing It
Lowell General Hospital has an active Facebook page that the hospital uses for health education and to show its team making a difference in the community. The hospital created a Facebook Event for its Teamwalk for CancerCare fundraiser in May 2017, and during the event shared candid photos and uploaded videos of hospital physicians participating in Dunk a Doc to raise money for its patients. (You remember this game from the carnival: you hit a target with a ball, and an unfortunate person falls into a tank of water, while the spectators cheer on.)
What We Like
Seeing that Lowell General Hospital’s physicians have big hearts and a sense of humor. But it wasn’t just doctors who faced the dunking tank. The hospital had volunteers from its administration and facilities departments. Maybe the best part of the videos is watching the employees throw their pitches.
62% of marketers say Facebook is their most important social network. (Social Media Examiner)
Recruitment Marketing Strategy Behind It
- Attracts local talent who care about the hospital’s mission
- Demonstrates the hospital’s values in action rather than just talking about them
- Makes it easy for candidates to follow you before they decide to apply
- Leverages employees’ networks to recruit
Making it Happen
If your Marketing team is managing social media for the event, volunteer to help out. You can assist with taking photos, creating videos and writing social posts with the candidate audience in mind. If you’re new to Recruitment Marketing, this is a perfect way to dive in and develop your social media management and content marketing skills.
One of the most important things you can do for recruiting is to get your employees to share the content with their friends. This will help amplify your reach. As long as your post is public, any Facebook user can share the post or tag themselves in it. You can tag them too. It will help encourage engagement from your employees, which is a great benefit as well.
On a Dime
The Dunk a Doc videos were captured in the moment using a smartphone – no big video production budget needed. Actually, these particular videos wouldn’t be authentic if they were captured any other way. And the authenticity is what makes them an effective recruiting tool!
For your next volunteer initiative, you can really be “in the moment” by using the Facebook Live streaming app.
If you get good social engagement from your employees, consider using an employee social amplification tool for your next volunteer event. These tools are sometimes called employee advocacy or employee engagement. One of the key features is the tools allow you to control which posts you invite employees to share, so you can focus on the ones with the greatest impact. Another key feature is the tools typically allow employees to share content with multiple social accounts at once, making sharing easier for them, which will further amplify your reach.